


Ondine

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M, Mermaid Q
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 20:31:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1441879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Commander Bond is not a superstitious man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ondine

**Author's Note:**

> One of two fics started during 221b Con 2014. Much love and thanks go to everyone who looked over this, helped when I got stuck, or encouraged me while writing it!

Commander Bond is not a superstitious man. He whistles freely, brings any number of women back to the ship without fear, has never seen anything in the dark seas but fishes of every type and description. There is no such thing as a sea maiden, and he knows a sea witch is nothing more than a whale, rising from bloat and decay to the top of the waves in a stinking, putrid froth. There is no magic in the sea but the freedom she affords to men like him. But.

There are hands wrapped around the rail, thin and spidery. They’ve been there each time he’s passed this shift, a week now since the ship first entered these cold northern waters. No one else seems to have noticed them, but today and every day he’s seen them still, with or without rum. They’re not quite human, thick with webbing and fingers almost unnervingly long.  He can see clean, square nails when he turns the glass toward them.

Every night, he’s avoided them. Coiled the rope on the starboard side instead, turned away from his hallucination before he has a chance to see what’s attached to those hands—if there’s anything attached. It’s not fear, it’s practicality; if he never sees what his mind has conjured, he can ignore it, can ignore the fact that he’s so desperate for a new face after these long months at sea that he could create one for himself.

Even so, it’s been days since he’s served his watch alone. The hands have—the owner of the hands has—been watching him, clearly as interested in him as he’s been pretending not to be in them. When he taps his foot on the deck, those long fingers echo the beat silently against the wood; when he swears low under his breath at the prick of the marlin spike on his palm as he splices the line, they flex sympathetically. And when he sings familiar songs of the sea, they curl with obvious pleasure.

The night is dark and smooth, the ship cutting through the polished black glass of the sea below with the hollow dark sky above lit and twinkling. It’s beautiful, and it fills him with a longing that slivers beneath his skin like splinters of metal, sharp and aching. It may be his imagination—the hands themselves or the wistfulness he sees in them today—but he wants to see them, wants to meet the person they’re attached to.

Bond slips his boots off by the door, tucks them behind a barrel so they won’t go anywhere, and pads over in stocking feet to try to sneak up on the hands. When he’s within leaping distance, he pounces, lands with his chest at the rail and peers over. It’s—

The face that peers back is moon-pale, eyes and mouth dark and haunted. He’s startled the—it’s not—there’s hair curling wet in the hollows of its cut-glass cheekbones and its lips are sweetly plush, but there’s something masculine in the curve of its jaw, the jut of collarbones and the thin strength of its narrow shoulders. He can’t see much further in the dark, but he doesn’t see breasts, doesn’t see the typical hallmarks of the winsome femininity he’s heard is the purview of the merfolk. Instead, the creature looks lanky and powerful, lithe muscle thin and strong. It takes him a moment to see anything past the thin glisten of the fins that frame that delicate face at all.

It watches him back, eyes seeming to drink him in as eagerly as he is it. Its brow quirks—and oh, what a human, sarcastic expression!—and with a sound like wood striking wood, it’s gone. He’s left alone at the rail still wondering if he’s imagined the whole thing and hopelessly charmed.

He doesn’t tell anyone what he’s seen; the hands don’t reappear for three more nights, but when they do, the boy hefts himself up until his face is visible through the slats with an almost apologetic expression. Bond grins at him and his lips quirk, too.

“Had something better to do than hang from the side of the ship like an overgrown barnacle?” Bond asks. The boy narrows his eyes, shrugging in a noncommittal answer: Maybe I did.  Bond laughs, surprised. “You can understand me?”

The look the boy gives him makes Bond sure he thinks him a fool, but the boy takes pity on him, reaching out to tap at the wood in a familiar pattern—long, short, long, long and then a break, short, break, and three short raps: yes.

“You know Morse?” Bond asks, surprised, and the boy puffs air through his lips with amused frustration.

“Yes,” he taps, and Bond laughs again, delighted.

“You’re brilliant,” Bond blurts, and a pleased flush steals across the boy’s face. One long rapping drag of the boy’s slender fingers and Bond nods, understanding. “What can I call you? I’m Bond—James Bond—what’s your name?”

The boy pauses, considers.  Long, long, short, long, then an inquisitive look.

“You don’t understand?” Bond asks, but the boy gives him a frustrated shake of the head.  Long, long, short, long; the boy taps and drags the letter, tipping his head again. “I don’t—what do you call yourself?” Bond rephrases.

The boy’s fingers are cold, damp and foreign against his skin when he wraps his hand around Bond’s ankle. With his other hand, he taps again. When he tips his head again, Bond watches his throat move and inspiration hits; he ducks his head to listen to the very faint vocalized clicking that comes from the boy’s throat like the chirping of a dolphin. “Get it?” the boy taps, and Bond nods, clicking his tongue in the pattern. The boy gives him a satisfied smile.

“What a mouthful,” Bond teases, enjoying the disgruntled look he gets in return.  “That’s Q, in the language we were using. May I call you Q?”

A nod. Bond smiles and Q moves to smile back, ducking his head shyly at the last moment instead. It’s lovely.

Q joins him at the rail for his shifts from then on; Bond finds himself volunteering, trading, cajoling to take it every night. There’s not much friction—no one wants to fight for the midnight hours, and Bond is able to work in quiet contentment, murmuring stories and humming quiet snatches of song. Q seems to relish music, presses his ear to the slats and sighs to hear Bond sing, thick lashes fluttering with pleasure. Once and only once, he returns with a soft, haunting hum of his own, throaty and more resonant buzzing through his lips than anything else, but no less beautiful for its eerie sound. He stops after only a few brief notes and goes a fetching pink, refusing with at first demure shakes of his head and then fondly annoyed tapping—No. No. _No_.—when begged for more.

As the ship moves south again, Bond finds Q showing up later and later, a small frown that grows into a grimace by the time he’s showing up with the palest light of morning against the horizon. When Bond asks, Q only taps a quiet, “ _Tired_ ,” and clings at the rail with shaking arms; it’s entirely by accident that Bond discovers the wooden spline tracing along the long curve of Q’s body beneath the water, and Q flushes, drawing away from Bond’s sight at first.

“Do you swim each night from the area where we first met?” Bond asks the rope he’s splicing as Q hides behind him.

“Yes,” Q taps. His fingers are slow, hesitant.

“That’s a long journey,” Bond muses. Q taps again.

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been wounded?”

Q begins to tap, stops, and curls a wet hand around the top of Bond’s shoulder.  When Bond turns to look at him, Q is pale, normally golden skin waxy with memory.  He curls his hands together to form teeth, a fearsome jaw, then gestures that something much longer has been made short.  His tail flicks, and Bond hears the wooden extension when it smacks against the hull gently; when Bond looks over the rail, he can see the beautiful work that Q has added to his own body, restoring himself to full capability.  The driftwood has been shaved, shaped into a flexible arc that Q controls with the powerful muscles that flex beneath the scales along his lower half.

“Remarkable,” Bond says, and Q stares at his face before breaking into a sunny smile that starts to pull his lips apart before he pulls back, diving into the water again.  The morning breaks calm and quiet around Bond as he waits for Q to resurface, but he has only a few scant minutes to himself before the ship wakes for the day.  His time with Q is growing short.

During the day, Commander Bond is the most senior officer on a small ship of Her Majesty’s Navy.  It has been an achingly long voyage, and he spends his days mostly pacifying a crew frustrated by endless blue days at sea and checking and rechecking their course as he ferries a team of disgraced officers out to begin their terms managing one of the southern penal colonies.  Captain Silva may outrank him, but the man has nothing like Bond’s loyal service record, and several barbed jokes about changing places have already been swapped for impeccable silence.  Bond would have the man bound for the other side of the chain if he had his way, but without official word he’s not certain why Silva puts him off so.  After his daily sniping about who is better equipped to lead Bond’s ship, Bond spends most of his days wishing the sun would go down faster and bring his bonny merlad back to him.

The storm, when it hits, is breathtaking.  He’s known that here in the curve of the world where the warm air and cool waters meet there is potential for storms, but its weight and might is breathtaking; the barrels loose themselves along the deck and the wind’s howls eat the frightened shouts of sailors in great, gasping gulps.  Bond lashes himself to the windlass in the cradle of its huge arms and shouts to be heard in the din; it’s in the flashes of lightning over the bow that illuminate—Silva’s knife flashes in the dark blue light and Bond has just the presence of mind to choke on a deep breath before he’s awash and the world goes dark.

He comes to in a grotto, back on the sand and chest heavy with seawater.  Turning to the side, Bond vomits, brackish water scouring the inside of his nose and throat in its rush to escape.  He coughs until his chest feels like a vise, until he fears he’ll never catch his breath again, until cool fingers like sweet, fresh water press smooth against his skin, soothing as his body rids itself of the stuff.  He turns and Q is closer than he’s ever seen before, hair slicked back and smile thin and worried.  Bond wonders if he’s died, reaching to touch Q’s face reverently; Q presses a tender-shy kiss to the center of his palm and slithers down the narrow band of sand to the shallow water that obscures the cave’s entrance.  His fingers dance on the water’s surface, but the splashes are indistinct.  He can’t reproduce the tapping that’s necessary to communicate.

“It’s okay,” Bond tells him through his seared-raw throat, flopping back onto the cool sand.  His clothes are wet and he shivers.  Q returns, skin clammy and chilled as he curls around Bond’s body, tail flicking idly.

“Safe,” Q taps gingerly against his arm.  “Safe.”

When he wakes again, it’s to the sound of a voice more ethereal than angels pitched low in song.  The cave walls reflect, amplify it, and Bond’s chest swells with the sound, delicate and sweet and ghostly, as the voice lilts and trips over the high, pure notes.  There are fingers in his hair, stroking, and the thick, wet feel of a long body behind him; Q is singing, was singing to him as he slept, petting at his hair.

“Q?” Bond asks, moving to push himself up.

“Good?” Q taps along his arm, the touch intimate and comforting, but Bond is already aching, missing that watery voice.

“You were singing,” he tells Q.  Q’s fingers still, then tap.

“Yes.”

“You can speak, instead of tapping,” Bond posits.  Q shakes his head.

“No,” Q taps, squeezing at Bond’s wrist with his spare hand.  “No.”

“Sing to me again?” Bond asks instead, turning to let his head drift on the sand.  Q’s fingers brush the center of Bond’s back then, obviously considering.  He shifts on the sand until his wet back touches Bond’s, the sharp quills of fin that trail up his spine digging in slightly as Q positions himself on the sand.  Bond can feel his chest echoing with sound, resonating with the sweet soaring cries of Q’s song.  He drifts off again.

Bond wakes to the sound of frantic breath, to the squirming press of Q beneath him, desperate hands at his chest as he fights and the smell of scorching flesh.  Some time in the night, he’s rolled, cupped Q to his chest and in his arms all miles of warm, drying, naked flesh.  He nuzzles, half-asleep, at that slender throat, nestles the tip of his nose against the collarbone to pepper the skin below with sweet kisses, eager to finally have his hands on his boy.  Q’s hands are everywhere about his head and shoulders, but he only registers the pushing when he hears—“Please, _please_ ,” Q whispers desperately against the top of his head.  “Please!”  Startled, he releases the boy, who shoves himself on powerful forearms down the beach.  Where his scales hit the water, a sort of steam hisses up and Q all but screams, throwing his head back, eyes and mouth pinched tightly closed.  

“Q?” Bond asks.  The silence worries him, and he shuffles down on aching limbs to the water’s edge.  Q’s ducked beneath the waves and surfaced, saltwater gathered like gemstones on his lashes.  His lips roll but don’t part, and he smoothes his hair back from his forehead with a frustrated hand.  “Are you hurt?”

Q cracks an eye to look at him wryly, clearly unable to stop the fond smile that tucks itself into the corner of his lip.  He nods, reaching for Bond’s hand to press a kiss to the knuckles.  “Good,” he taps shakily against Bond’s hand, and Bond’s heart sinks.

“You can speak,” Bond accuses.  Shaking his head, Q begins to tap frantically, long, short, break, long, long, long, over and over, but Bond pulls back.  Q lets him, eyes bruised and longing but unwilling to breach the distance between them.  “You can.  I heard you.  I _have_ heard you, when you were singing.”

Q shakes his head again, frustrated, and reaches for Bond’s hand, but Bond draws further from the water’s edge.  They both know Q won’t come out right now, perhaps even can’t, and Q pounds his fists in the sand, frustrated clicking welling up in his throat.  The wet sand mashes, smearing streaky up his wrists, and Q holds up a finger, turning to concentrate.  Dragging a fingertip through the grit shakily, he begins to form words, and Bond groans, turning away.  

“I don’t care, Q.  I know you can speak.  I don’t care what you want to spell out, what you want to write.  I want to hear what you have to say!”

“You don’t understand!”  Q’s voice is sharp, precise and sweet, and Bond turns to look at him, stunned.  “Don’t turn around!” Q begs.  “I—please, if you—don’t turn around.  I’ll talk to you; just don’t look at me.”  And Bond can’t imagine why Q should ask, but he obeys, sinking into the sand facing away.

“Your voice is beautiful,” Bond murmurs reverently.  Q’s laugh is bitter.

“Of course it is.  It’s supposed to be.  Haven’t you heard of what my people do?  You’d dash your ship upon the rocks to hear me sing, wouldn’t you, Bond?” he asks, his tone a subtle knife.  “You’d do anything I tell you to just to hear my voice.”

Part of Bond knows he would.  Part of Bond knows that whatever Q asked of him with that voice, he’d trip over himself to obey and wouldn’t even doubt, wouldn’t think twice about offering any sweet pleasure to coddle Q’s whims just to make him happy.  There’s honey in that voice, and poison.  “I would,” he admits.  Q laughs again, still broken-glass sharp.  But part of Bond knows—“You wouldn’t, though; you’d never make me.”  He says it confidently, and Q’s laugh again sounds shattered.

“Oh, yes I would.  I coaxed you for days with nothing more than my pretty face; did you think I cared about you?” he asks, and his voice is dry, so painfully dry.

“You rescued me,” Bond reminds him, but for the first time he feels the chill of the cave, feels the absence of humanity and the ocean’s clutch surrounding him.  “You pulled me from the waves.”

“I brought you here to devour you,” Q tells him, and despite Q’s warning, despite the cold fear that’s clawed its way onto his shoulders at that, Bond turns.  Q looks devastated, heart in his eyes and broken on his lips.  Bond’s fingers find the laces of the shredded shirt he still wears and tugs, pulls it off to reveal his torn and weather-beaten chest.

“Then you may have me,” he says, and Q’s eyes go dark with want.

Beneath his lips, Q’s skin is chilled and salty, the flavor complex enough to leave him hungry for it; he slides the tip of his tongue along the line of Q’s jaw, sucking hard at the pulse point and the dark moles that mar the stretch of golden sweet skin.  Q purrs in his ear, throat vibrating like a cat as he cups Bond’s head in his arms, peppering the top of his head with kisses.  Q’s torso surges against Bond, splashing and soaking his breeches through with icy seawater; Bond leans back to tug his way out of them and Q watches, ravenous.  When Q pulls him back into the water, his kisses are strangely chaste, closed-mouthed but eager, lips sliding along Bond’s skin as they pet each other everywhere.  Q’s nipples are hard, dark flat ovals on his chest that make his tail twitch and writhe when Bond strokes the pad of his thumb across them, then follows with the flat of his tongue.  Over his head, Q makes a curling sound so high Bond suspects only dogs could hear the whole of it, arching into him.  There’s a point, a lump forming low inside Q’s abdomen, and Bond traces his fingers over it with a playful grin, listening to Q’s gasp overhead.  His tail twitches hard enough to slam the wooden brace into the stone wall with a clatter and Bond chuckles, reaching for the buckle to help him ease it off so that it won’t be damaged.  

There is a nasty scar running the length of Q’s body, a ragged, hurt-looking edge where the graceful curve of him has been truncated.  Q curls, twists his fingers anxiously over the thick scarring that exposes pale white fish flesh between the snarled scales, and watches Bond beneath his lashes; Bond smiles, gingerly brushing the edge of the scar with a gentle fingertip.  “I’ve never seen a green so extraordinary,” he says softly, and Q sinks into the sand, fingertips fluttering at his throat.  Bond brushes at the lump again and Q keens, clicks and chirps coming from his throat as Bond explores him, rubs his fingers against the softer flesh of his exposed belly, and when Bond trips his way into the discreet slit he finds there, Q lights as if struck by lightning.

Everything inside is hot, wet with sea water and more, and Q fills the cave with squeaking noises that leave him covering his face as Bond feels.  The edges of the slit are thick, meaty, and inside is something that Bond can only imagine is Q’s cock, delicate and thin and definitely bulking up as he eases his dry fingers in and around the slips and folds inside.  It happens quickly: he twists his fingertips in the opening just far enough to the side and Q emerges, a shape so alien that for a moment Bond doesn’t know quite what to do with it.  Q’s focus is sharp; he curls Bond’s fingers against his lips and reaches for a palmful of water to lubricate.  When he pours it over his slit, it fills, leaves him wet like a woman and gleaming, slick enough for Bond to grip his cock in a fist and follow the delicate twist of it up to its thick, spiraled end.

There’s not much that they can—they’re not physically compatible, there’s no hole for Bond to fuck and Q’s cock is too flexible for penetration, but Q makes the most delightful sounds as Bond manipulates him, and it’s only when Bond drags his hand up from Q’s cock to rub absently at his face that he realizes not all of the moisture on his hand is seawater, that Q has been squirming his way through liquid orgasm after orgasm that have left him bright-eyed and panting on the sand.  His hand carries Q’s smell, musky and pungent, and when he licks at the chlorine taste Q closes his eyes, shivering.  Bond has seen some of the larger sea fish playing, fucking their way through hours alongside the ship; he wonders idly how much longer he could touch Q before he would push his hands away, weak and overstimulated.  The thought makes him throb.

Q turns a curious eye to him when he wraps his palm around himself.  Bond wads his hand, the one that smells of Q and come, into a fist by his face, remembers the dreamy way Q had squirmed beneath him, and fucks into his hand, twists his wrist and palms the head slick and wet and hungry.  There’s something innocent in Q’s fascination, in the way his eyes go hot and wide as he watches Bond strip his cock with efficient pulls.  When he reaches out with one tentative hand, Bond groans helplessly at the feel of the thick webbing where it wraps around him to cover his hard flesh so thoroughly.  Q is fascinated, clearly, tripping over Bond’s foreskin as if marveling at the lack of a sheath to protect him, fingertips rubbing at the fiercely red head before lining the slit of his cock and dipping back down to the shaft eagerly.  Before he’s quite prepared for it, Bond finds his balls drawing up tight, clenching hard in his lower belly before the concentration on Q’s face makes him spasm, coming with a guttural sound that feels torn from his salt-worn throat.  Come-streaked fingers disappear into Q’s mouth and he makes a thoughtful sound, toying with Bond’s cock, confused as it only softens in his grip.  Bond laughs at Q’s expression, dragging him up into a loose grip to tuck him under his chin.

“I’m too old for more than once a night, darling,” he tells Q, and he feels Q’s quiet laughter against his chest.  Q’s fingers rub soothingly at his skin as he drifts off to sleep.

He wakes ravenous, hungrier than he’s been in years, since his first commission on a small ship that had ended up underequipped in the hot, still seas at the middle of the world.  Q is dozing in the water, half in and out of the surf.  His head is a riot of curls dried enough to scatter and hold sand; he glances up at Bond and his smile is wide, unguarded for the first time.

It’s horrifying.

The smile slips from Q’s lips as quickly as it’s come, but the damage is done: Bond still sees row after row of knives, sharp and needle-like, blades of tooth intended to rip and shred and maim.  Q’s hand comes up, shaking as it covers his mouth, and then he’s gone, disappeared beneath the waves with only the slightest ripple to mark that he was ever there.

He waits two days, but Q doesn’t return; when he slips beneath the water to the cave’s entrance, he surfaces to find he’s within sight of the shore, easy swimming distance, but though he ducks back into the cave, overwhelmed by the thought of returning to the land, Q doesn’t return and he swims back, more brokenhearted than anything else.  

Bond comes to land at the edge of an estate owned by a man called Mathis, and Mathis immediately draws him in as though he were family.  It is Mathis who tells him that he is here at a warm island far from his original course, who helps him regain the weight and muscle he’s lost, who dresses him and deals with his dark moods as he stares out across the water seeking a familiar face.  Bond sends a letter home to Skyfall and receives one back saying that his Captain had declared him dead, lost at sea, and that his estate has been sold from beneath him; the value of the property will be enough that Bond can easily set up house wherever he would prefer, and of course his old job is available for him if he wants to return to the dark and smoggy cities he’s come from.  He leaves the letters unanswered, offers Mathis a small fortune for the use of a small cottage on the edge of his property for the forseeable future, and spends his days going sunblind from the white light reflecting off the waves, his nights going moonblind as he stares into the dark.

Mathis finds the boy only a month or so after Bond turned up.  He tells Bond that this is normal, that the cove on which he built his home is blessed of the seafolk and that they return lost items here frequently: bits of flags and coins embedded in the sand, sometimes shoes and drifts of wood.  He’d found a flexible length adorned with leather belts and buckles not terribly long ago, but he’d thrown it back, sure it wasn’t meant to be abandoned, and in return the sea had given him the boy, sick with sunlight and unwilling to say a word.  He’d put the boy in one of the rooms of his villa and that is where he’d stayed, unable to leave due to the grievous injury caused by, Mathis presumed, the shipwreck that had stranded him; as he speaks, Bond finds his heart in his throat.

“May I visit him?” he asks, and Mathis shrugs.

“I don’t see why not, though I don’t know what company a mute boy will be, especially one with no leg from the knee down,” Mathis says genially.

With his heart in his throat, Bond waits for Mathis to knock and follows him into the room.  It’s beautiful, as expansive as the one Bond spent his own recovery in, done up in pale butter golden colors that highlight the slight, dark figure in the center of the bed.  Q doesn’t look at them, gazing instead out to sea with the fierce longing of the homesick.

“How?” Bond croaks.  Even from here he can see that there are no scales, that filmy fins have been replaced with the delicate pink whorls of ears, of human ears, that Q has given up, somehow, the long, sinuous arch of his tail for one leg that ends in sweetly curling toes and another that stops just below the knee in a knot of scar tissue he has tucked into the bedding.  At his voice, Q turns, lips parting in surprise to reveal the even white pearls of his teeth.

“Bond,” Q gasps.

“He can speak!” Mathis cheers, but Bond can barely hear him over the rushing of his own blood.  He sweeps into the room, touching Q’s face and arms and the thin strength of his shoulders, finding him whole and mostly healthy.

“How?” Bond demands again, and Q’s blush is sudden, pinking up the ridges of his ears.

“It—when we dry out—” Q murmurs, carefully lifting the edge of the nightshirt he is wearing past the bounds of all propriety to show the burned scars of scales at his hip.  There are only a few of them, angry-looking diamonds still red and welted.  Bond brushes his fingers across their unnatural heat and imagines Q lying on a beach somewhere secluded, drying himself until his fins were gone, burned away without the water’s healing grace to protect him.

“You can’t go back, can you?” he asks softly, and Q’s guilty look tears at him.

“Would you want me to?  Would you send me back?” Q asks, the pain in his voice quiet and thready but tangible; Bond touches the scars with his fingertips despite Q’s hiss of pain and draws him close, touching his face with his own, forehead to forehead, nose to cheek.  He brushes delicately at the inflamed skin and breathes against Q’s mouth.  Long, short, he taps as firmly as he dares.  Three long swipes, and Q gasps into his mouth, curling around him.


End file.
